Pick Me Up Festival

The brief

Pick Me Up is a graphic arts festival that ran annually at Somerset House in London from 2010 to 2016, showcasing international contemporary illustration and design across eleven days each spring. From 2012 onwards, Stylistic was brought in to design and build the festival’s digital presence — including a complex multi-vendor eCommerce platform that allowed individual artists to manage their own pages, set their own prices and fulfil their own orders directly through the site.

The thinking

The platform needed to work for two very different audiences simultaneously — festival visitors browsing and buying art, and the artists themselves managing their own commercial presence without technical support. That meant building something genuinely flexible: custom artist pages, individual product management, independent delivery settings and order handling, all within a single coherent platform that felt like one cohesive festival experience rather than a collection of separate shops.

Each year, the festival’s visual identity was redesigned by an emerging artist — and each year, Stylistic redesigned the website completely to adopt that identity. Same underlying platform, entirely new visual language. The foundations were built solidly enough to carry five consecutive years of completely different creative directions without compromise. It was a deliberate annual challenge that kept the digital experience as fresh and vital as the festival itself.

The outcome

The store became a significant commercial channel for the artists involved — enabling sales that extended the festival well beyond its eleven days at Somerset House. The annual rebuilds demonstrated something more valuable than any single project could: that Stylistic could absorb a completely new creative direction and deliver something that felt considered and complete, year after year, to deadline.